Dorothy Rosby
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GENRE: Humorous Essays
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BLURB:
Christmas comes but once a year; chaos never ends! Happy Halloween, merry Christmas and joyful Lumpy Rug Day. That’s real, by the way. Lumpy Rug Day is celebrated every May 3, though “celebrated” might be too strong a word. It’s the American way to create a celebration for everything, then turn it into a chore or worse, a nightmare. ’Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate is a collection of humorous essays about how we let our expectations steal the joy out of Christmas and other holidays and special events. It’s understanding for those who think Christmas form letters can be honest—or they can be interesting. And it’s empathy for anyone who’s ever gotten poison ivy during Nude Recreation Week or eaten all their Halloween candy and had to hand out instant oatmeal packets to their trick-or-treaters.
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EXCERPT:
Excerpt One:
from essay: Merry Christmas from the Envyofall Family
There are two things that make me feel like a boring person. Actually there are more than two, but the ones that come to mind this time of year are writing a Christmas letter and reading everyone else’s.
When I write a letter I come to the painful realization that the year has flown by and I’ve been terribly busy but I haven’t done a thing worth mentioning. Worse, when I read all the newsy holiday letters I receive I think the writers must have had more days since last Christmas than I had, and apparently more money, energy and ambition as well.
I don’t think I’m alone in my feelings of inadequacy either. Consider the following actual letter I made up. You’ll see in brackets what an unfortunate reader might be thinking as she reads this holiday greeting from the Envyofall family.
Merry Christmas from the Envyofalls!
We hope your year was as wonderful as ours was! [I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.] We started the year with a January vacation in Hawaii. [Now I know it wasn’t.] Since the children are both doing so well in school we decided taking them out for two weeks would be acceptable, and they enjoyed themselves thoroughly. [I’ll bet their teachers did too.]
In June Maxwell and I celebrated our twentieth anniversary with a month in Italy. [What a coincidence! My husband and I celebrated our anniversary in June too—at the Olive Garden.] You can see photos of both vacations on our family website. [You can see our vacation photos too—if my phone is working.]
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Dorothy Rosby is an author humor columnist whose work regularly appears in publications throughout the West and Midwest. Her humor writing has been recognized by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, the National Federation of Press Women and the South Dakota Newspaper Association. In 2022 she was named the global winner in the Erma Bombeck Writers Competition in the humor writing category. She’s the author of four books of humorous essays.
Author Interview
December 18 stop at Hope. Dreams. Life... Love
1.Did you always want to be an author? Yes, I think I did. I still have a tattered notebook with my handwritten attempt at a novel in it. I don’t even remember how old I was, but inside the front cover there’s a note I wrote to my younger brother telling him to “keep your damn nose out of this. It’s mine.” I guess I wasn’t quite ready to show my dream to the world.
2.Tell us about the publication of your first book. My first book was, I Used to Think I Was Not That Bad and Then I Got to Know Me Better which I published in 2014. I call it the book for people who read self-improvement books and never get any better because it’s a collection of humorous essays on anxiety, bad habits, communication, fitness, prosperity, relationships and other topics one tries to improve upon by reading self-help books. When my publishing handed me the proof copy, she asked me how I felt. I think she expected me to have some sort of strong emotional reaction. And I know a lot of readers have those when they hold a book they’ve written for the first time. But I didn’t. In pondering it later, I think it felt like just another step in a very long process.
3.Besides yourself, who is your favorite author in the genre you write in? I read a lot of humor, but most of it is in online humor groups I belong to. There are so many I love that it would be hard to pick a favorite but a few I enjoy are Ivy Eisenberg, Janie Emaus and John Branning.
4.What's the best part of being an author? The worst? I’m an author, a syndicated humor columnist and blogger and I would say the best part of writing in general is the feeling I get that I’m doing exactly what I was born to do, using my gifts as fully as I can. The worst part is that it’s very hard work that isn’t always rewarded in any way. That’s when the best part, knowing it’s what I’m meant to do saves the day.
5.What are you working on now? I’m in the process of putting together my fifth book, a collection of humorous stories with the working title, That Which Doesn’t Kill You Makes a Good Story Later. These are all true stories about experiences I’ve had, but they’re greatly exaggerated because you get to do that when you write humor. I perform regularly with a local storytelling group so many of the stories have been performed for audiences. Website: https://dorothyrosby.com/
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Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578295520
Audible https://www.audible.com/pd/Tis-the-Season-to-Feel-Inadequate-Audiobook/B0CBW57GYM
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